Our Kingdoms Lost
by hyb9
Summary: Clark/Bruce. How Clarkson Wayne became Clark Kent. And maybe even atoned along the way. AU
1. Chapter 1

"A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness."

Margaret Atwood

* * *

Clark hears the news when he's walking to breakfast before dawn, through the mist and the sharp green scent of crushed grass.

He woke at the braying of the old donkey. Cass was tender with the sheep under her care, happy to nibble carrots from Clark's palm, and livid toward any wild thing preying upon her flock. Clark ran from his cottage, barefoot through the dew. There were only a few sleepy bleats from the sheep, huddled up in their pens with the spring lambs. Cass was pawing and stamping yet, and Clark had to shoulder her away from her quarry.

The badger still snarled weakly, yellow teeth bared, but its gulping breaths were thick with fluid, the reek of blood copper bright. Clark froze despite himself as the world narrowed to those bubbling inhalations, the thready whine of agony beneath. In a blink his vision shifted, involuntary, and he saw the trampled spine, the lung punctured by a rib. Once he saw Cass run off a fox, but it was fast, disappearing in a russet blur, unscathed. When Clark lowered his hand to the badger's ruff it whimpered, long claws scraping down his forearms and leaving no more than muddy streaks in their wake. The neck snapped like a green branch beneath his grip and Clark sobbed, once, hugging his knees. Buried his face in his arms until he could trust himself not to be selfish, not to commit the vanity of crying for his own crimes.

Out of sight, he heard the wolfhound pup stir in Mrs. McNamara's kitchen, his paws twitching against the tile. Clark's employer would wake if Duke kicked up a fuss, and Clark's lurching nausea at the thought of being seen, of sharing his guilt, was enough to drag him to his feet. He sucked in air, an uneasy rattle like wind through a broken window, a took up the badger's body gently. Its coarse fur smelled like musk and earth beneath the blood and acrid fear. Rising shifted the pitiable weight in his arms, the badger's head lolling heavily against Clark's chest, its eyes lidded, its nose as broad and soft as any dog. Clark stared until his eyes burned. Then he turned and trudged through the pasture, over the dilapidated fence, toward the fringe of shadowed trees. Amid the roots of a gnarled oak he discovered a sheltered hollow, a cradle large enough for a forty pound badger, and laid the body down for the other badgers, the foxes or the crows.

Clark returned to the spigot by the pens and pumped the groaning iron handle, flecks of rust catching on his skin. He held his hands under the icy gush until the rust was stripped away, the mud, the scent of badger. The mossy cottage in which he resided was far closer to the pens than the farmhouse, for the convenience of the shepherd. A ten by ten space, it demanded little of him and held a narrow bed, a dresser near empty, a kettle atop a single electric burner, a paperback novel with pages curling in the damp Irish air. The room was as he left it – boots forgotten at the door, blankets thrown off the bed in haste. The wind-up clock on the dresser read quarter to three and inspired in him no inclination to sleep. He peeled out of his pajamas, the hems sodden and knees stained. There was a faint smear of blood on his shirt that had escaped his notice – he balled the shirt up and shoved it beneath the rest of the laundry in his hamper.

When Clark had walked to the farm last December clutching Mrs. McNamara's advertisement, cut from the local paper, she had measured him in one keen glance and laughed. Fresh off a cargo ship full of textiles from Bangladesh, he wore woven sandals and linen pants which deterred the cutting wind with the approximate effectiveness of tissue paper. She seated him at her kitchen table and made him tea, questioned him expansively, and offered him an advance on his first month's pay so he could purchase warmer clothes, lest the neighbors fret that she was maltreating her hired help. She introduced him to her husband, Miles, when he came in from the snow with a sodden, enthused puppy. Told Clark that he would do just fine, a strapping lad like him, and didn't flinch upon adding that Miles would forget him by tomorrow, just like he would forget the year or the names of their grown sons, and Julie McNamara could tend her own husband just find – but if Clark ever saw him wandering from home and brought him back, she would be much obliged.

Clark cocked an ear, and detected no movement in the farmhouse. Duke was snoring again, and Miles and Julie breathed in the same rhythm like a single creature. He pulled on a scratchy, warm sweater and corduroys and trekked back to the pens. The sheep grumbled at his ministrations as he pet the ewes, gently cupped the bellies of the newborn lambs for fullness. Most were full, lambs drowsy and content. Number five, who Clark had silently named Caleb, was hungry and plaintive, too weak to lift his head. Upon inspection Clark found his mother with her udder full, teats too broad for Caleb to nurse. Once he milked her, filled a bottle, and allowed her to kick him, he settled against the plank wall with Caleb in his lap. Clark coaxed and murmured, rubbed a smear of milk over the lamb's mouth, and finally he latched onto the bottle's rubber tip and nursed, squirming closer to Clark's warmth. Clark closed his eyes and breathed with the flock.

When he wakes again the sky is shading black to indigo, and Mrs. McNamara has the kettle on. If Clark focuses on the rustling sounds, he can smell the coffee grounds, the sizzling tomatoes in the skillet. Caleb curls easily against his mother in the hay when Clark lays him down. He plays a tired old guessing game with himself as he ambles up to the farmhouse, listening to his host and her tuneless humming, wondering when a human would start to hear her. This close? No, too far away. The leaning porch comes into view, and he hears the click and crackle of the radio coming to life. News from abroad. Duke is on the porch, lifting his head at Clark's approach, tail whistling through the air.

News from Bhutan, of Bruce Wayne, missing for three years. Clark's joints have locked – unseeing, he hears Duke whine at him in concern. Bruce Wayne, shot by militants, falling into a mountain river, body not recovered. Presumed dead. Photographs. Proof. Dead.

Clark still can't see, but now the world is a blur of starlight and cloud. Can't hear, for once, can't hear anything over the screaming wind. It must be how a bullet would feel, piercing the air just like the howl on his lips when his feet left the ground. The wind is trying to strip him out of his skin, peel him apart like some dead thing, pull his limbs out of joint. Wind against bare skin, his clothes are gone, sweater ripped away like it never was.

When Bruce couldn't sleep, when he was too stubborn to wake Clark, he would pull on their father's sweaters. Pace the halls with cashmere sleeves hanging down to his knees.

It starts as a shudder. Convulses along his limbs, and then Clark is falling. Hurtling through cloud, and he can't think how to stop. Can't think. The chill only feels like Bruce's icy feet, when he would climb under Clark's blankets and hide against his shoulder. Shake and never make a sound.

Then he hits the barn, and everything stops.

...

Clark is too heavy to lift. Or so the woman tells him. Tells him again, when he flinches. There are mud-spattered boots protruding from beneath her nightgown, cotton flannel worn pale at the seams. A man beside her, hand at her elbow. There's hay and earth in Clark's mouth, in his nose. He chokes it out before he feels the weight of the blanket laid across his back. She's speaking, words that roll over him unheard. There's an electric lamp in her hand. When the moon slips past the clouds, through the yawning hole in the roof, it catches silver on the barrels of the shotgun hanging lax at the man's side.

The hands that pull the blanket around him belong to a stranger, though they affix to his own wrists, his own arms. He fails to rise past his knees, shuddering for all the stars to see. Minutes ago – minutes ago? - he was on the farm, near Cork, with the sheep. Now there's mud drool down his chin, and he's making himself small under the blanket. Maybe he can compress himself into nothingness. He's never tried.

The man is inscrutable as river-washed stone. But he grips Clark's shoulder, anchors him to the earth. Clark follows the strength in that hand. Follows on numb legs to warm light, to creaking stairs. They fold him down into a soft chair. A damp cloth touches his face. He doesn't see the shotgun again – never saw it leave the man's hand. His eyes are dry. The wind stole his tears, swallowed his grief in its roar. A faucet drips. An animal grinds its great flat teeth. Crickets sing shrill as violins. The woman wrings out her cloth over the sink, water slapping against steel. Clark watches her lips move, and swims toward her through the din.

"-happened to you, you don't have to say."

"My brother is dead." And that's his own voice, that hoarse, rusted thing.

The woman wipes his brow and puts a bowl of steaming broth in his hands, nudges his elbow until he drinks. There in the kitchen, looks pass between her and her husband that Clark can't begin to read. She tilts her head and the man grunts once before shuffling to brew coffee. The smell blooms earthy and sharp until a strange house, creaking around him, begins to seem familiar.

"I'm sorry," he says. He holds an empty bowl and it occurs to him to pass it back.

"Ain't no sorry," the man says. He holds a chipped mug to his chest. After a moment, he lays a hand on Clark's shoulder. "You can sleep here. We'll run you a bath first. Get all the mud and – splinters off."

"My name is Martha," the woman says. "This is Jonathan." The cloth is warm against Clark's cheek, the clean skin in its wake shivering with evaporation. "What's your name, dear?" She speaks slowly, bent at the waist like one comforting a lost child.

"Clark," he says.

"Clark," she says. Nods once. "Let's see about that bath."

"I- your barn."

"Plenty of time for that in the morning," she says. 

* * *

tbc


	2. Chapter 2

"Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory... we are all kings in exile."

G. K. Chesterson

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.

.

…

Dawn breaks baleful with the growl of thunder, rain slapping against the farmhouse, shutters banging. Lightning rouses Clark, sears white through his eyelids, drags him upright like a fish on a hook, gasping for air.

Martha tucked him in like this, he recalls. Bundled under quilts on a sagging tartan couch, his bare feet overhanging the edge. Martha waited in the hall when Clark huddled in the bathtub last night, tapped her knuckles against the door when he was silent too long, when his thoughts dissolved into catatonic white noise and he stopped moving.

Clark remembers that he's in America now, based on the easy Midwestern drawls of his hosts. Yesterday, he was in Ireland.

He remembers that he flew, flung himself from the earth like a rocket. Soared across an ocean, hurtled into a barn.

He remembers that his brother is dead.

A hand pats his shoulder and Clark jolts, choking on a sob. Martha tugs her sleeve over her hand dabs beneath his eyes. Thoughtless, Clark buries his face against her stomach, and when she curls around his shoulders her limbs feel light as a bird's.

"My mother's name was Martha," he says. It feels vital, the dizzy certainty that she ought to know. Thunder rattles the windows again, and Martha strokes his hair, her calluses catching faintly.

They're nothing alike, really. His mother wore grey pearls and crisp silk jackets, clouds of Chanel, her hands were milk white and soft. Her only callus came from holding a Mont Blanc, penning letters to the Daughters of the American Revolution and dashing off donations to charity. But she would hug him, hold him near like this when he was small enough to hide against her. Sing him old torch songs in her smoky voice. Tell him to always look after his brother.

"Then maybe you're supposed to be here," Martha murmurs.  
.

…

.  
Jonathan fries apples in a skillet for breakfast, redolent with cinnamon, while Martha battles the butter dish out of his hands, clicks her tongue and mutters about cholesterol and damn fools. The lightning has abated but the rain lingers, clouding the windows. It feels like they're all at sea together, the farmhouse is just a rudderless boat rocking on the waves, the rest of the world out of sight.

But not out of mind. Julie and Miles will be sitting down to lunch by now, they'll have found Clark's cottage empty, and his throat aches at the thought of them, of all the fragile lambs Clark helped bring into the world these past weeks.

Clark is in Kansas, they tell him. A town called Smallville. The Kents grow organic corn, keep a few plots of produce for the local market.

There are bushels of dried flowers tied with yarn hanging in the pantry. After they eat – after Clark chokes down his meal, tasting blood and dirt – Martha enlists him to help fold a hamper of clean sheets, to sprinkle lavender between the layers. Clark conceives that the Kents are being gentle with him, chatting mildly, revealing of themselves but never questioning.

"You should be more careful," he says, interrupting Martha as she describes the attributes of a perfect butternut squash. And they should be. The Kents have brittle joints and sun-weakened skin. Could easily be strangled in their sleep by a stranger in their home. The kind of stranger who might crash into their barn, naked and shivering.

Martha scoffs gently, tugging a sheet out of his grip. Jonathan arches his brows over his third cup of black coffee.

"Not sure I take your meaning," he says. Sucks down more coffee like the meaning of life is written at the bottom of his mug. "You planning to do us harm, son?"

"No," Clark says, too sharp. His hands are tightening on the back of a chair, and the wood groans in distress. Clark swallows, shoves his fists into the pockets of his borrowed sweatpants. Dares a glance back up at the Kents. "But I shouldn't be here. You haven't even asked me how- I got here. Do you understand, I – flew. Crashed. Here. I flew across an ocean. I didn't mean to."

The chasm of churned earth Clark left should be proof enough, but Jonathan doesn't blink. Martha hands Clark another sheet and pats his elbow. It's abruptly, stupefyingly clear that in the light of day the Kents will choose not to see, to ignore the evidence for the comfort of the mundane.

"That would be enough force to flatten you. And look at you, not a scratch," Martha says, not unkindly. "You're grieving. Of course this is a confusing time for you."

"I was in Ireland yesterday," Clark insists. Hates the way his voice shakes. They think he's delusional. Jonathan opens his mouth, and the words are lost in the sudden bellow of thunder, the deafening roar of blood in Clark's ears. The knife Jonathan used to slice the apples is propped on the drying board, the broad blade flaring blue with distant lightning. Clark grasps the handle and plunges the knife into his forearm.

Martha screams, hands flying up to her mouth. Jonathan's mug shatters on the floorboards when he lunges, grapples for Clark's wrists. Tendons stand out in Jonathan's arms and still Clark puppeteers his limbs away without difficulty, he's is still grasping for Clark's hands when Clark holds his arms out, palms turned upward in supplication. The skin is golden and unblemished. The knife's handle rests in the curl of his fingers. The blade is on the floor, crumpled like a discarded staple.

"Nothing hurts me," he rasps. Not a knife or a fall or a bullet.

Jonathan releases his wrists. Clark can see his pulse jumping in his throat, above his flannel collar. Martha appears beside her husband, pale but steady, folding Jonathan's hand in her own. It seems to galvanize him, and he looks Clark in the eye.

"Can't see how that changes anything, what with you not intending us any harm," he says. To his credit, his voice is even.

"Course it changes things," Martha tuts. Her heart is still knocking at her ribs, but she chafes Jonathan's hand and smiles at Clark. "Means you're in fine shape to be fixing that barn. Just don't you do _that_ again, scared me to death."

Jonathan nods, blinks, lurches to gather up the fragments of his mug, rubbing coffee out of the wood with a rag. Martha eases the handle out of Clark's palm without resistance. This close, he's drawn to stare at the laugh lines bracketing her eyes, the sunspots across her nose. Clark has lived for three and twenty years and his face is unlined, he's never produced a freckle, not a one. There are no scars to tell the story of his life.

"I'm not human," he pleads, willing her to believe. Martha scoffs, dropping the remains of what was a knife into the garbage.

"Darlin', human isn't nothing but a word." The rain is quiet again. There's light flaring through the clouds, and Clark follows Martha's pointed glance out the window, to the red barn and its gaping roof.

"Now, maybe you've broken a few things," Martha says. "That's alright. Nothing you can't make whole again."

"Excepting the knife," Jonathan says, looking up from his dustpan. He cracks a crooked grin. "That one's good and broke. Anyway, never did like that knife. Cuts tomatoes funny."

"You're about as helpful as a house cat," Martha scolds, throwing a dish towel at him. "Clark. If you need to leave, we won't stop you. I can't imagine the weight you're carrying. But there isn't anything we need to know, unless you want to tell us. You want to stay and patch up that roof, we'd be much obliged."

"And if you still want to stay, there's a room upstairs and plenty of work come spring," Jonathan adds. "I've been having some back trouble. Could use another pair of hands, and you've got mitts like dinner plates."

"Why would you trust me?"

There's a pitying sound that Martha muffles with the back of her hand. It seems to unlock something in Jonathan. He rises with knees popping, brushes his hands off on his jeans. Clark roamed the Arctic for a year, once he discovered he didn't have to eat, lay out on glassy sheets of ice under the midnight sun. That fathomless sky didn't make him feel as small as the weight of Jonathan Kent's regard when he lays his hands on Clark's shoulders.

"Because you'll earn it."  
.

…  
.

Clark learns the Kents.

Martha has a scattering of smooth scars up her forearms, from hot oil and absentmindedness. She wears reading glasses on a chain but forgets them perched in her hair. She entrusts the window sill with her wedding ring every time she washes the dishes, snaps Jonathan away with a towel when he elbows in to help.

Jonathan's left shoulder sits an inch lower than his right, where a cow kicked him, back when his parents pastured cattle. He took his first steps clinging to a mastiff's tail, can recite the exploits of every dog he's known since, mutts and herders and one clumsy Dane. There are frames on walls and shelves, faded Polaroids pinned over a desk, and Clark comes to recognize every muzzle and lolling tongue.

They never talk about the boy in the photographs. He doesn't resemble either of them, burnished golden in some snapshots while the Kents freckle, his nose a keen owlish hook that neither can claim.

There are pictures of him as a toddler chasing a bristling orange cat, of a boy with skinned elbows beaming over his skateboard. He never appears any older than Clark sees him in the photograph over the mantle. A graduation, red robes, the boy flushed and beaming, the tassel of his mortarboard obscuring one dark eye. Martha stands beside him, and she's not so thin as she is now.

Clark thinks of the boy, when he sleeps in the spare bedroom. There's no dust there, but the sheets are faintly stale with disuse, the traces of lavender older. When Clark examines the dresser drawers, they're full of folded jeans and sun-bleached cotton. He closes them without sound.

To attire Clark, Jonathan dragged out a dented cardboard box from the basement, shook out his self-proclaimed "fat clothes" from within. Even so, the shirts strain at Clark's shoulders, the jeans fall above his ankles. Boots are an impossibility, so he thanks Jonathan for the sandals he can spare and wears them through the April dew.  
.

…  
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Jonathan forever has the vexed brow of a man who prefers comfortable uncertainties to uncomfortable answers. When mulling a thought, he drags his right hand through his graying hair, and so the thatch over his right temple always stands askew.

Just now, he looks like he's trying to be charitable.

"I don't have much experience with tools," Clark offers. "I fixed a fence. Once. But not very well, because a badger got through." Jonathan exhales gustily.

"Badger?"

"I was working- I was watching sheep. Donkey got the badger, anyway."

"Donkey got the badger. Is that a riddle?"

Clark sidesteps the ladder and walks off the roof. Jonathan rolls his eyes, and it feels like his father's hand between his shoulders. It's stupid, this childish urge to be seen, now that the Kents know the truth of him. Clark never wanted Bruce to see him. Not after the first time.

"You can raise donkeys with sheep. Llamas, too, but I haven't seen those. They'll chase off predators, same as dogs. Guard the flock. Even though it doesn't belong, the donkey protects the sheep. Even though they're different species."

Of course, a better fence might have kept the badger out.

Clark looks up to the gambrel roof, his bent nails and crooked planks.

"Maybe I should start over."  
.

…  
.

Sleep eludes him, since the first night, but he sits on the quilt in the bedroom with the dead air until Martha and Jonathan breathe in unison. Then he walks the long fences of the farm, past the razed cornfields, and when the sun breaks over the flat horizon like the edge of a new penny it doesn't remind him of home.

There's enough strength in his hands to crush steel. He's walked through a roaring fire in a factory, all that untreated cotton flaring at the first spark. Carrying the workers out, teenage girls with eyes streaming and lungs heaving, Clark never struggled for breath, the smoke never troubled him and the flames only licked at him curiously.

If he were in a mountain river, the current furious and frothing white, he could still swim. Dive beneath the churning surface and pull someone to shore before they drowned.

Clark wonders how many hours his brother was under the water before the radio crackled to life in Mrs. McNamara's kitchen. If having control, being able to soar over an ocean, would have made any difference.

Sleep doesn't come, and Clark stops seeking it.  
.

...  
.

Jonathan's humor is gruff and Martha has a penchant for folksy idiom. Clark winces to think of the assumptions he would have made, in his private school days. Lex in particular had a biting, merciless wit.

Now he sees Martha's lovingly displayed collection of first edition Vonnegut novels. Stuffed under almanacs and newspapers there are sketches, Jonathan's patient, intricate renderings of snub-nosed prairie voles, meadowlarks with keen bright eyes and jonquil breasts.

There is more poetry in their plain speech than any empty verses Clark recited in school. Oliver would like that. The transcendent souls of honest, laboring Americans. Oliver liked to hear himself talk as much as Lex; he never worked a day in his life.

Neither did Clark, before.  
.

…  
.

Clark can't abide the rust smell of blood. When he asks Martha if he can abstain from meat at meals – the home-cooked meals provided to him without cost – he flushes guiltily. She piles the mashed potatoes higher on his plate, and never mentions the matter again.

Across the table, Martha is measuring precise tablespoons of gravy onto Jonathan's meatloaf. He cajoles and she laughs, throaty and musical, luminous in her devotion. When she laughs, the shadows under her eyes ease.

She dishes more string beans onto his plate, passes the butter wide of Jonathan's reach. Jonathan puts his elbows on the table and makes his case for a man's right to butter, still contesting a battle he lost years ago, and Clark aches with love for them both.

Something dusty stirs beneath his breastbone and he desperately wants to be good enough, for these gentle people, wants to deserve the space he occupies within their lives.

Clark lays down his knife and fork, and they both look to him.

"I was born on a planet called Krypton," he says.

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.

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.  
tbc


End file.
